


The Change You Made

by northernexposure



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Angst, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 17:56:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20246938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northernexposure/pseuds/northernexposure
Summary: He loves her. He has always loved her.





	The Change You Made

**Author's Note:**

> Had totally forgotten I'd written a little Kira/Odo ficlet. Archived from a couple of years ago.

_Not easy to state the change you made._

_If I'm alive now then I was dead,_

_Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,_

_Staying put according to habit._

* * *

The first time they meet he calls her pretty. The words surprise him: he had not realised they were forming in his mouth until they were already in the air between them. He winces inwardly, regretting that of all his facets, words are the one part of himself he cannot reabsorb at will. She is defensive, which tells him that it's something she hears a lot. She misunderstood him – but that, he realises, is his fault not hers. He should have been different around her. He should not have been as others have been. In the life she lives being beautiful is a curse additional to the one of being born among a race of slaves.

When he leaves her, he finds himself wondering why he had never considered that before. Moreover, he wonders why he finds himself considering it now.

He knows she is lying, but he cannot bring himself to give her up.

He lets her go for the first time, with no inkling that it will not be the last.

* * *

_You didn't just toe me an inch, no –_

_Nor leave me to set my small bald eye_

_Skyward again, without hope, of course_

_Of apprehending blueness, or stars._

* * *

Years later, he sees her smile. There is something unfettered about it, perhaps because it is not only on her lips but also in her eyes, eyes that he has somehow remembered all this time. She is different: still fierce, still fire, but now there is joy in her too, or at least the potential for joy. There is hope, the sense of a new beginning. A beginning that, he is astonished to realise, includes him.

His second glimpse of her makes him remember the first. How, in that first meeting, she had told him that sooner or later he would have to pick a side. He had wrongly believed he did not take sides. He understands now that even as he walked away from her table, he had already chosen. Wherever she was, that was his line in the sand.

This realisation, this pinpointing of a change, accompanies something so shocking that he tries to turn away from it. This slow creep, this burn making manifest something in him that he did not know existed: did not know _could _exist. She has taught him something about himself without even realising it.

He can feel.

He _does _feel, and what he feels he feels for her.

* * *

_I shone, mica-scaled, and unfolded_

_To pour myself out like a fluid_

_Among bird feet and the stems of plants._

_I wasn't fooled. I knew you at once._

* * *

There is nothing he can do: nothing that he would know how to do. She has awakened in him something not just dormant, but alien. Before her he privately mocked the paroxysms that solids endure as they undergo what they euphemistically term 'affairs of the heart'. He knows it has nothing to do with the heart – attraction is a chemical reaction, and besides, he does not have a heart, which is just another of his oddities. And yet this: this desire to know more of her, to stand beside her, to simply engage her in conversation though there is precious little for him to say… He does not know how to deal with it. He does not want it, this new part of him that has found its way – unbidden, insoluble – beneath his approximated skin.

He watches her fall in love, elsewhere, listens as she tells him her hopes and fears, with his own standing before him so clearly and so close that he could reach out and touch them if only he were someone else.

His friends typify him as a gentle man, but he knows better. He knows how to restrain himself, how to hold back, yet it is not the same thing. He knows that for her, he would kill. He knows that for her, he would change history if there was cause to do so.

And there is a thing. Would he go back? If he could turn back the clock, if he could really change history - so that it is not her sitting at that dirty table, so that it is not her face he sees and that instantly, instantly throws him off balance… would he do that? Would he take this thing inside him away, this thing that he continually thinks he has under control, until the moment it becomes clear that he absolutely does not?

If he did, would he know as much about himself as he does now? He doubts it, somehow. She gave that to him, unknowingly and without malice, and he cannot throw it back. She is part of him, and he cannot – will not – remove her.

He loves her. He has always loved her.

* * *

_From stone to cloud, so I ascended_

_Now I resemble a sort of god_

_Floating through the air in my soul-shift_

_Pure as a pane of ice. It's a gift._

[END]

_Stanzas excerpted from 'Love Letter' by Sylvia Plath, 1960._


End file.
